Whether your goal is to lose weight, tone up or maintain your current fitness level, maintaining a healthy lifestyle is about more than just hitting the gym and eating a healthy, well-balanced diet. Believe it or not, your mental state may just make or break your health and fitness goals. It’s time to get break those old habits and throw out those negative thoughts that are holding your back from achieving your goals. Let’s take a look at some of the most common mental roadblocks when it comes to leading a healthy lifestyle and what you can do to stop them.

Are you constantly putting yourself down? Whether you feel bad about your food choices or the fact that you may not be able to exercise as long as you would like, feeling bad or shameful about yourself can actually hinder your ability to achieve success in the health and fitness world. Instead of focus on the negatives, think about what you have achieved. Instead of putting yourself down, be sure to reward yourself for all that you have accomplished. Remember leading a healthy lifestyle and seeing changes in your body does not happen overnight. Reward yourself along the way and expect progress to take time. Next time you achieve a goal, give yourself a small reward — whether it’s a new workout top, a night out with friends or relaxing by the pool with a good book do something to reward your hard work. You’ve earned it.

Do you have trouble picture what the new you is going to be like. If you have struggled with your weight, exercising regularly or eating healthy for years, you are likely to have a hard time envisioning what a thinner, healthier or more toned version of you is going to look like. In order to stir up some inspiration and build confidence, consider creating a healthy vision board. This can serve as a tangible reminder of what you would like to achieve. Cover the board with inspirational quotes and images. When you are feeling down or have trouble envisioning your success, take a look at this board to boost your confidence.

Are you too focused on the scale when it comes to achieving your weight loss goals? Sometimes to be successful, you need to turn your focus away from the scale. When it comes to losing weight and leading a happier, healthier lifestyle, it’s not always about the number on the scale. Instead of becoming discouraged when the number on the scale is not dropping, focus on your accomplishments — such as your clothes feeling loser, you running your first mile or having more energy all day long. Once you realize what you are capable of achieving, the positivity should remain with you.

Are you stress out? Stress management is key when it comes leading a healthy lifestyle or losing weight. When your body is under stress, it produces an extreme about of a stress hormone known as cortisol. Cortisol reduces your body’s ability to burn fat. Even with healthy habits, stress can make it difficult to achieve weight loss goals.

Whatever your road block, it is important to realize that with motivation and effort you can overcome any obstacle. If you are willing, your fitness goals are within your reach!

Are you looking for fitness motivation that will really work? The following are reliable fitness motivation tips that personal trainers use to keep their clients inspired and on track to meet their fitness goals.

Don’t Tackle Your Fitness Goals Alone
You may want to keep your fitness goals private, but research has proven that people who tackle weight loss with a form of accountability (personal trainer, weight loss partner, running buddy) are more successful than those who try to succeed without assistance. This is because your friend or trainer will help you exercise when you feel too tired or eat right when you might have cheated, were no one else to know about it. Just make sure you choose someone who you trust enough to be totally honest with them and who is just as committed to success as you are.

Set Yourself Up for Success, Not Failure
Before you scoff at this tip, ask yourself this: How many times have you set out to lose weight or get in better shape and then failed to meet those goals? Now ask yourself this: why didn’t you meet those goals?

Chances are you tried to accomplish too much too quickly or signed up for some extreme fitness plan and then burned out. Instead, set achievable goals, broken down into goals that seem so doable they are almost laughable. Then blow those goals out of the water! Your self confidence and motivation will soar as a result.

Celebrate the Victories You Can Control
You can’t control how much weight you lose or how much muscle you gain each day, but you are in control of how well you followed your diet plan or how much effort you put forth exercising. Instead of celebrating results, celebrate your efforts.

This will help you to persevere even on those weeks when you plateau and don’t see results. It will also help you stay focused on what you can do instead of how helpless you feel when your body doesn’t respond the way it used to. This will help you find solutions instead of throwing in the towel or assuming no solutions exist.

Reward Yourself Regularly
Most of us seeking to improve our fitness over 40 need a little extra boost. Our bodies are more resistant to change; we naturally want to hang onto extra fat, and our muscles are more prone to atrophy than they were when we were under 40. We’ve got hormone changes working against us.

That means you are going to be making greater efforts for less payback. As a result, you need extra fitness motivation.

Choose ways to reward you that are tangible and support your fitness plans. Then reward yourself generously and often. We’re all a little more like Pavlov’s dog than we’d like to admit, and a little reward can go a long way.

Educate Yourself About Fitness Over 40
Your body is changing and will continue to change. After age 40, our metabolism slows and our bodies produce different levels of hormones, making us more prone to retaining fat and losing muscle tone. However, there are measures you can take to combat these changes. For example, try eating small meals more often (to keep your metabolism up) and start a weight training program to combat muscle atrophy.

The fitness over 40 challenges doesn’t end here, though. You’ll want to start reading up on what you can do to improve your fitness as a mature adult, taking advantage of the vast amounts of information now available to us. With proper education and support, you’ll find your fitness motivation will flourish and your ability to meet your fitness goals will grow.

It takes time to lose weight, there is no quick and magic formula that is going to get you skinny overnight. At forty and over you must realize you did not gain this weight overnight, so naturally it is not going to disappear overnight. So don’t get discouraged, it will come off with hard work. You know now what you must do regarding exercise and healthy eating, so when you do lose the weight, you can keep it off and remain fit!

Weight loss is hard, and we get discourage when we don’t see results rapidly as we want. Remember you did not get this way overnight therefore you will not loose overnight. Just keep working and you will achieve your goals. If you slip that is okay just get right back to it.

In order to get something you never had you must do something you never did!

We all have some set backs in our lives. You and I like many others have set goals at the beginning of the year and now it is April and we have slacked off from our commitment. It is hard to stay focused, but you have t0 think about where you are and where you want to be. I do not feel like working out today, but I can’t beat myself up about it. I will workout tommorow. You have to stay focused on your ultimate goal, which is to live the second part better than the first. Stay positive and assoicate with positive people and activites and you will achieve your goal! You cannot be perfect everyday, and as long as you realize this you will reach your goal. So ,what we had a set back but we have strength, energy, determination to get back on track. If you are over 40 you know set backs don’t last forever!

The fact is for most of us the biggest obstacle to losing weight outside of a medical condition is ourselves. We must learn to crawl first and then walk. There are literally thousands of weight loss techniques, diets, vitamins, gimmicks, videos all which can enhance our efforts but the key to any of it working for me and you is our approach and attitude. If you succeed you become a powerhouse not only in losing weight but in every aspect of your life and self esteem, your relationships and love for yourself and your compassion for others. Your whole life will be altered and your direct action can put all of this into play.

Only you can make this change, not your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend or friends in general. There is only you in this battle and yeah, it is for your life.

How can we do it? We can accomplish this by focus, discipline, dedication, meditation, reflection and compassion.

Focus: Work daily on your goals

Discipline: say no to what we know is bad for us.

Dedication: Stay true to your goal and your new way of life

Meditation: Calm yourself and love yourself

Reflection: Continue to think where you are and where you want to be

Compassion: Take time to share your thoughts

I created fitness-over40.com to help inspire people and myself to reach our goals.

Remember: If you keep doing the same thing, you will get the same results.